Knights of the Black and White

TEN

On the morning when Princess Alice of Jerusalem was to be wed to Prince Bohemond of Antioch, two men, both up and abroad long before dawn, viewed the occasion differently from the mass of their fellows: Brother Stephen St. Clair of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ was oblivious to the event and its grandeur, having far more on his mind than any mere wedding or state occasion could usurp, whereas Bishop Odo of Fontainebleau, who would be in attendance at the wedding ceremony, had other plans to occupy himself during the grand reception and banquet celebrations that would follow the marriage ceremony. His intent was to take full advantage of the kind of opportunity that seldom came his way. Neither man gave a thought to the existence of the other, each of them intent on his own affairs.

The wedding itself was sumptuous, the most splendid affair seen in the Holy Land since King Baldwin had assumed the throne. Alice was not his firstborn daughter, and as such she would not inherit his throne; everyone knew that honor would pass to her elder sister, Melisende. And Melisende had been betrothed for years already and would marry, in the fullness of time, but Alice was the first daughter Baldwin had bestowed in marriage, and young Bohemond, the heir to the Principality of Antioch, was pre-eminently suitable. The Patriarch Archbishop officiated, and the sonorous chant of the massed monks throughout the solemn nuptial Mass moved many of the congregation close to tears. Throughout the entire ceremony, King Baldwin sat proudly beside his beautiful and exotic Armenian wife, Morfia, his head held high. His kingdom was secure, for the time being, and it was commonly understood that this dashing new son-in-law would be a strong and vigilant ally in maintaining the northern outposts of his kingdom against the Turks who posed a constant threat to him in the east.

The Seljuk Turks had been in decline as a fighting force ever since the fall of Jerusalem, almost two full decades earlier, but they were still an ever-present menace. And a recent report had described what might be a new, non-Turkish threat, from Syria. Saracen was an unfamiliar word—a generic name for the infidels from that distant part of the world. Now, however, spies were telling the king that a new Muslim horde, calling themselves Saracens, was stirring beyond his borders, in the enormous wastes of Syria, where yet another manifestation of the seething cauldron of political forces that comprised Islam was taking shape.

An outbreak of coughing followed quickly on fresh, thick clouds of incense billowing up from the censers surrounding the bridal couple at the main altar. The King rose to his feet with the other celebrants and joined the Te Deum chant of rejoicing for the newly wed couple.

A SHORT TIME LATER, having made his formal and prearranged obeisances to monarch and patriarch, Bishop Odo of Fontainebleau stood apart from the throng, watching the royal party depart the church for the grand banquet that would be served in the main hall of the royal palace, and he frowned at the unexpected and unwelcome sight of the spy, Gregorio, approaching him, keeping to the side and out of the way of the departing guests, and looking meaningfully and urgently at the bishop. The fellow came right up to him and stopped, waiting to be acknowledged, and Odo made no attempt to hide his displeasure.

“Are you mad? How dare you approach me openly? I told you never to come near me unless I sent for you.”

As usual, the little spy showed no sign of being discomfited by the bishop’s displeasure. He merely made a moue and dipped his head to one side, accompanying that with a tiny, disparaging shrug of his shoulders.

“You also told me that I should come to you directly as soon as I had proof that the monks in the temple stables were guilty of anything.”

Odo straightened up. “You have proof?”

The spy shrugged again. “As good as. They are talking about a treasure they have found, beneath the temple.”

“Beneath the—beneath the temple? Are you sure of this?”

“As sure as I can be. One of their sergeants, whom I pay well to listen, overheard two of them talking about it. They have found gold, and jewels, and a trove of documents.”

Odo turned away, leaving the little man staring at his back, but he was thinking furiously. He had an assignation this afternoon, long in the planning and carefully arranged, with his young Muslim mistress, Arouna, the daughter of Sheikh Fakhr Ad-Kamil, and he had no wish to forgo it. All her male relatives were here in the palace today, attending the wedding, and this had presented him with a golden opportunity to enjoy an afternoon of lust with the girl without the usual haunting fear of being discovered and killed out of hand, and so he had made arrangements to absent himself from the celebrations, claiming that he had work to do on the Patriarch’s behalf and that, besides, he was on the last day of a self-imposed penitential fourteen-day fast.

This new development, inconvenient as it was, was completely unforeseen, but the possibility it presented for enriching himself was unprecedented, and timely beyond belief. A treasure in gold and jewels for the taking … Alice was besotted with her new husband and had been preparing to leave with him for Antioch since before Bohemond’s arrival, and Odo knew, beyond doubt, that she had no thought in her head nowadays about the pestilential knight monks and their underground activities. Now if this story of Gregorio’s was true to any extent, Odo might have an opportunity to profit beyond his wildest dreams, since no record of any treasure, far less the extent of it, existed. If he could lay his plans quickly enough now, and with sufficient care, he could take action as soon as Alice had safely left Jerusalem, presenting himself in a heroic light to the King, and at the same time sequestering a substantial portion of this treasure for his own, exclusive use.

All that need be done, he was thinking, given that this new information was true, was to summon the knight monks to a meeting with the Patriarch, there to denounce them and have them all taken into custody, while Gregorio conducted a quick search of their excavations before the King had time to organize a search of his own. Gregorio, Odo knew, was devious enough to manage that adroitly, in return for a substantial portion of whatever he was able to extract from the treasure in advance of the King’s exploration. How large that portion should be would be negotiable, but Odo was prepared to part with half the total, provided that Gregorio, who was a puny little man, should survive to claim it. He turned back quickly to find the spy looking up at him, waiting patiently. They were alone, everyone having vanished into the palace proper.

“Come with me, then. I have to disrobe. We can talk while I am doing that. Come.”

Once they were alone in his chambers, Odo began to strip off his ceremonial vestments. “Who is this sergeant that you have in your pay?”

The little man sniffed. “Giacomo Versace is his name. He is one of my best. I inserted him into the ranks of the sergeant brothers long ago, when we first started looking for evidence against the monks. He has been one of them for a long time now, and he is trusted. It was he who found the one called Brother Stephen—the St. Clair knight—after his abduction.”

“And is he trustworthy?”

“I trust him, but I sense that might be no great recommendation to you. But if you mean can we believe what he says, then yes, we can. I told you, the monks trust him, and he is one of those fortunate people, in my profession, who possess the fine art of becoming invisible when they wish to remain unseen. He is among the knight monks constantly, always working, always unobtrusive, and always listening. The two monks he heard conversing about the treasure are the two called St. Agnan and Gondemare. Versace was in the stables, by sheer good fortune, sitting quietly among the fodder bales when they came in, and they thought they were alone. He heard them talking of chests of gold and silver coins, and cases of jewels, buried for a thousand years in the tunnels beneath the mount, in the very bowels of the temple. They were hoping that they might be able to use them to buy armor and weapons, and horses. Versace listened carefully, then remained where he was, in hiding, until long after they had gone. He had waited for more than a year for that moment and had no wish to jeopardize his safety by being too impatient. Then, once safely out of there, he came directly to me.”

“Did you reward him?”

“Aye, with what I had at hand. That was not much, but it would buy him a jug of wine. I had no concerns about that, either, for I know the man well. He is more closemouthed than I am. But I told him, too, that I would reward him more amply later.”

“I will want you to point him out to me later … He has no knowledge, I presume, that you are in my employ?”

“Why should he? He works for me and I see him well rewarded. That is all he cares about.”

“Excellent. Now, the two monks involved, what did you say their names are?”

“Archibald St. Agnan and Gondemare. He only has the one name.”

“Write those down for me. There is a pen and an inkwell there on the table.” The spy wrote down the two names while Odo finished pulling on his outer robe, a plain, brown garment that was entirely nondescript and would permit him to walk the city streets without being recognized and without drawing attention to himself. He took the piece of paper, read the names one more time, then folded it and placed it on the tabletop, covering it with the inkstand.

“Now, I want you to go back and talk to your man Versace again. Question him closely this time, and find out precisely what he overheard, every detail, every word, with particular reference to these tunnels beneath the temple. How do they gain access to the tunnels? That is most important, but be careful not to alert this fellow to how important it is. I would not normally presume to instruct you in your own profession, but pretend to be idly curious for more detail and find out everything there is to know.”

“Well, we know how they gain access, do we not? Through the tunnel, or the shaft, that they were excavating years ago.”

Odo sniffed. “That may be so. They said they were digging out a monastery in the rock, but I would wager they dug far deeper and farther than anyone could ever suspect. That will remain to be seen. In the meantime, however, I want to be sure we have gained every little piece of knowledge that your man Versace possesses. Come back to me in three days’ time, and I will give you final instructions. In the meantime I can promise you this: if all goes well here, you and I will share a large portion of this treasure equally. I will invite the brothers to a gathering, and then I will denounce them while they are with the Patriarch and have them arrested. You, in the meantime, will enter their tunnels and locate the treasure, and once you have done so, you will immediately take our portion, as much as you can comfortably handle, and set it aside where it will not be discovered. I will then accompany the King’s Guard on a search of the tunnels, and we will find what remains of the treasure and present it to the King, who will be more than happy with our work. Then, when everything has settled down and the treasure has been removed by the King’s men, you and I will divide what remains equally. Are we in agreement?”

The little man eyed him carefully, one eyebrow raised high, almost in mockery. “Aye, my lord Bishop, we are indeed.”

“So be it. Make you sure, then, that you drain your man Versace of everything he knows. Now go, and come back in three days.”

Odo watched the little man leave and then stood deep in thought for several minutes before taking a light, drab traveling cloak from the cabinet where he kept his episcopal robes. He threw it about his shoulders and made his way out of the building, relieved, in spite of all his planning, to encounter no one between his chambers and the main entrance. Once on the street, he looked in both directions, then quickly made his way across the main thoroughfare and into one of the numerous alleys between the surrounding buildings.

He walked quickly after that, keeping his face covered with the cowl of his cloak to ensure that he would not be recognized if he was seen by anyone he knew, and his confidence grew as he passed out of the precincts of the royal residence into the city proper, where he knew he would blend in with the crowds in the streets as he made his way towards the small house that the Princess Alice le Bourcq had taken for him, through some discreet and faceless intermediary. It stood on the outskirts of the city, close by the eastern wall but far enough from any of the main gates to afford him a measure of anonymity, even although he was obviously a Frank. There were enough ferenghi living in Jerusalem by that time for their presence to be accepted without rancor by the populace, and many of them were soldiers who, for one reason or another, mainly involving women and access to women, managed to maintain a private roof over their heads in addition to their formal barracks housing. The danger of his being recognized by any of those, he knew, was minuscule, especially when he was wearing shabby street clothing.

He was impatient to reach his destination and the fleshly delights that awaited him there, because thanks to the chaos that had descended upon Jerusalem with the arrival of the Prince of Antioch nigh on a month earlier, it had now been twelve days since he had last seen Arouna, the beautiful and depraved child mistress who had besotted him. He still could not quite bring himself to believe, after almost four months of delight that outstripped anything he had ever known with the exquisite Princess Alice, that Alice had thought sufficiently highly of him to have endowed him with such a reward in the first place, and had then gone out of her way to provide him with safe accommodations in which to conduct his secretive and highly perilous liaison with the young Arab girl. He knew, and in moments of tranquility could even acknowledge to himself, that he had much to thank the princess for, including this current opportunity to lay hands upon an unsuspected treasure. Had it not been for Alice, he would never have given a thought to the temple monks and their subterranean activities. He knew, too, despite what his vanity might prompt him to believe about his masculine attractiveness, that Alice could easily have simply dismissed him out of hand when she was done with him, denying him her favors and defying him to do anything about it. That she had not done so, and had in fact gone to great extremes to ensure that his pleasures and his lusts were amply provided for, in compensation for his loss of her personal attentions, had become more and more flattering with the passage of time and his growing fascination with Arouna, the astonishing replacement she had provided.

Visualizing the lascivious delights he was about to experience, he felt himself becoming aroused and lengthened his pace. Gregorio had kept him late, later than he wanted to be, and Odo resented the spy’s unfortunate timing, even as he thrilled again at the thought of the possibilities the little man’s information had generated. Ahead of him, he saw the narrow side street that would take him to his house, but at the same moment he became aware of the figure walking towards him in the distance, a tall Frank, wearing a full suit of gleaming, sand-burnished mail covered by a plain white surcoat.

The sight was unexpected and unpleasant, for the white surcoat of the knight monks had become a well-known sight in Jerusalem in recent years, though they numbered only nine, and Odo knew from the youthfulness of the approaching man’s stride that this could only be the youngest one, the knight St. Clair, who called himself Brother Stephen, the one among them most likely to recognize him. Cursing quietly to himself, he was heartened a little to see that the knight was unaccompanied and appeared to be walking like a man in a dream, staring ahead into nothingness and unaware of his surroundings. His heart suddenly hammering in his chest, the bishop extended his stride even more and swung into the alleyway before St. Clair could come close enough to see him.